lbrlabs - A Github Org for my Homelab

TL;DR: - go here

I often spend time in my day job wishing I could implement $newtech. I’m lucky enough to be working on projects right now that many people would find exciting, interesting and challenging, however it’s often the case that I see something I’d like to try, but deploying it at $dayjob requires me to design for large scale and with security and compliance in mind.

When this happens, I generally try it out in my “homelab”. This might mean trying it in a cloud account (I’m particularly fond of DigitalOcean for this) but I also recently reinvested (I moved to another country last year, and had to sell my previous homelab equipment) in a very small homelab consisting of 3 mini PCs and a Dell T30 server, along with some UniFi.

My original intention was to blog about the journey, but I realised this might end up being more time consuming than I’d like, so with that in mind I decided that perhaps the best way to contribute knowledge back to the community was via Github.

I’ve created a new Github Org, lbrlabs to hold all this configuration. Alongside this, I’ve created project boards which will detail my journey as I build out the software in my homelab.

Currently, the Org consists of 3 repos:

• tf-kubernetes-clusters - a repo containing simple terraform code for Kubernetes clusters for a wide variety of cloud providers. The intention here is to make launching a cluster easy and straightforward for testing purposes
• puppet-homelab - a Puppet control repo containing roles and profiles for my homelab. This could be used as a starting point for anyone wishing to build out a homelab, I’d encourage forking this and tailoring to your needs
• kr8-cluster-config - a repo containing configuration for kr8 which allows me to quickly and easily install components inside the Kubernetes clusters I build. As an example I have components like metallb which allow me to have Kubernetes LoadBalancers.

Some of the other tooling I’ve implemented includes:

• CoreDNS via a Puppet module which allows me to control my DNS infra
• Choria so I can quickly run tasks across the whole homelab
• external-dns via a kr8 component so I can automatically update DNS when deploying webapps on my homelab cluster
• cert-manager via a kr8-component for automated TLS on my homelab cluster
• consul via the Puppet module

In the near future, I plan on implementing other tech like:

• Vault for secret management
• Prometheus
• eyaml encryption in Puppet

My hope is that doing this in the open can help other homelabbers learn about enterprise software, specifically DevOps related projects.

I encourage people to open issues in the repos, asking questions about how to implement things. Hopefully this can be my way to give back to the community.